Pound perhaps the caged panther in his small garden at the federal asylum for the criminally insane. Yet the garden seems curiously lit from within, regardless or perhaps even because of the distance between the real literal and the imagined paradisal situations.

John, Oh my, yet again with that stupendous door-stopper Heidegger being flung as the first stone. Heidegger and E.P. have about as much in common as yours truly and Angelina Jolie. Let he who is without wrong...

As Ed points out, St Elizabeths was anyway a punishment that should have satisfied the legions of Judge Judys.

In addition to their resonance with other images in a passage which concerns compassion, the lines: "...for me nothing. But that the child/ walk in peace in her basilica" perhaps have personal referential content for the poet.

The passage seems, among other things, to hint of the confusion and vulnerability of a poet who would always be shy of speaking his emotions directly in "public".

In her memoir Discretions Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz touches upon her father's reticence in speaking of private feelings, pointing out that in the rare instances when this kind of revelation does occur in the Cantos, it is most often expressed indirectly, through the medium of another language, French (as here), Greek, etc.

The immediate reference in Canto XCIII is to a visit by his daughter, her husband and their children to Washington in 1953. Their purpose was to try to get him out of the federal insane asylum. But, as Mary recalls in her memoir, her father did not want to discuss his own difficult situation, instead deflecting the conversation to her efforts to restore a derelict castle in the Dolomites:

"'Thank God you have taken time to produce a family and lead a sane life.' And it never bored him to listen to accounts of Boris and the children and of our efforts with the castle. But whenever I tried to lead the conversation back to 'What can we do to get you out of here?' he became tense and impatient: 'All you can do is plant a little decency in Brunnenberg'".

Pound's admonition to his daughter re. "planting" brings back some memories and puts me in mind also of the physical basis of EP/big cat connection.

In 1963 it came to pass that I was enlisted, in the role of volunteer emissary from a collector/curator, Jim Ede, to travel to that little castle in the Dolomites, to which E.P. had repaired for a while after his liberation from St Elizabeths. My mission was to request that Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, in E.P.'s possession since its commissioned creation in 1914 by the doomed young sculptor (who shortly after creating it went off to die in the trenches of France), be donated to the Tate Gallery.

Once I had scaled the Tyrolean Alp upon which the little renovated castle perched, I was greeted by Mary, and two things quickly became apparent.

First, Mary looked very much like her father; the features were feline, even leonine; I was reminded of the comment of the poet Herbert Read, upon meeting Pound in London in 1915 (E.P. was then thirty), that he gave the powerful impression of "an agile lynx".

Second, the Hieratic Head, which had that same strong leonine character, had been quite literally "planted" -- there on the grounds, as a sort of wonderfully commanding white marble garden ornament, looking out over a vast valley that stretched halfway to Innsbruck.

A young fool had just arrived from nowhere asking that it be dug up and carted away.

Mary was extremely polite, if understandably the slightest bit brusque at first, in declining. She even provided tea and biscuits. It had been a long hike up that mountain.

(The alpine "basilica" by the way had proven too cold and draughty for the by then unwell and largely silent old man, who was off in Venice at that point, chez Olga Rudge.)

Thank you Billy, and Yes, the black panther, the pard and the lynx, protective figures, from the Ovidian beginnings, all through those dark woods of the intervening years.

One recalls the Lynx Chorus of LXXIX, writ in Pisa, mixing into the ritual his black fellow inmates ("O Lynx, wake Silenus and Casey...").

And in LXXVI, earlier on from inside the wire of the camp, the paradisal memory of the cliffs of Sant' Ambrogio,

ac ferae familiaresthe gemmed field a destra with fawn, with panther...

And then, in the last bit writ at Pisa (LXXXIV), the "objective correlative" of his restless prison camp doldrums,

and the he leopard lay on his back playing with straw in sheer boredom, (Memoirs of the Roman Zoo)

I speculate that he had never "realistically" expected a basilica at Brunnenburg, so cannot have been too surprised not to find it. The nature temples, votive altars and other sacred spaces of the poem, the sanctuaries and refuges, with their panther and lynx guardians, had surely always existed as symbolic templates solely in his imagination, in any case. Wonderful to consider the things that came forth out of that precinct. By force, initially, of invention, but later perhaps of desire in desperation, and need?

And thank you Billy, yet again, for evoking the late "quiet house" at Torcello (from CX), very close to the spot where he'd really discovered poetry in himself, in 1906...

Hast'ou seen the boat's wake on sea-wall,how crests it? What panache?paw-flap, wave-tap, that is gaiety...

I was (yes I was) during my second or third period of "formative" years say 1960 -1974

meeting many many many of (what are now considered) our Immortals..

and, in about 1977 I 100 % dropped out...(dropped back in in 1999) maybe I got scarred via meeting and schmoozing and sending of poems to the Likes of Cage, Mac Low, Corman, Bill Stafford,

etc etc etc..

sort of took the same road that Ezra Pound's daughter, Mary did which he offered (as you quote):

"'Thank God you have taken time to produce a family and lead a sane life.'

I feel like.... who wrote it? Washington Irving...a combine ofRip van Winkle and the Headless Horseman..

Googeling around for information on/about what transpired during the years 1975 and 2,001

just doesn't 'cut it'

I NEED A BOOK

like Ed Mund Jabes needed "books"

I need/want

The Book of What It Is I Missed

-more or less

so

I am now really "digging" your ... comment stream here... especially now that Billy Collins (who he? I've heard the name...and I think that he and I [...], but, I'm not sure) has entered the seen (sic)..

Hugh Kenner died? When did this happen?

In 1974, John Martin rejected (because he had too many things going) a book of mine saying:

Dear Ed,

sorry that we cannot {..}. Would be interested in seeing your next book."

Your Olson chair-busting anecdote puts me in mind of a woman interviewee who told me a similar story when talking about Charles, and for that matter, something tells me these were not "isolated incidents"...